Dealing with gods took up a lot of attention.Cato-Ikent was only the second version to have that privilege, and it made him just as busy as his Urivan counterpart — not that he was about to inform either Mii-Es or Initik about the other’s cooperation. Trust was a fragile thing and there was no telling what politics were at play. Initik had clear motivations and handles; Mii-Es seemed to enjoy the social game of veiled questions, hints, and trading favors. Or, perhaps, she was simply desperately lonely.

    He had yet to see another one of her species anywhere in the System, when he’d even spotted a few high-rank Sydeans scattered around the various worlds. Some of the hints she’d dropped in their conversations implied that, like Initik, she’d risen to her station from Copper, rather than being born into it like the Core Clans. So somewhere out there was her home planet, but it might have suffered the same fate as some that he’d seen, where the natives couldn’t handle the System. Whether it was because of malevolent gods or because the apocalypse destroyed so much there wasn’t enough of a civilization and people left to survive.

    That was one thing that he’d pinged his various selves to actively look for. Just because he was spread over hundreds of thousands of worlds didn’t mean that every scrap of information was available everywhere at all times. He simply didn’t have the bandwidth for that.

    Of more immediate concern was the list, which was almost worth being capitalized, of vulnerable worlds and gods. Obviously he couldn’t tell which worlds were Clan-owned and which weren’t on his own, but with the list he was able to establish a small if statistically significant trend toward higher infrastructure. It wasn’t universal; a few of the worlds were practically undeveloped. But he could see the patterns where some frontier worlds were being treated as fringe territories, whereas others had people invested in their well-being.

    Projected onto a map, it was clear that the clans had staked out the main thoroughfares of portal connections, mostly relegating the independent gods to small pockets and dead ends. It seemed like the Clans weren’t trying to completely push independent gods off their claims – Cato could imagine that Initik would put the hurt on anyone that tried with his world, for example – but they were also geographically isolated to prevent any kind of power bloc from forming.

    Clearly that hadn’t worked, if he understood Mii-Es correctly. He would have loved to be able to negotiate with the alliance of small gods himself, because he really have any problems with saving any System-God that had the welfare of the populace in mind, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet, at any rate.

    On each of those listed worlds he bring forces in closer, just in case. Some of them, particularly in the inner worlds, had scant presence to begin with and he tasked those Lineages using jager frames with launching more material there. It could cut potentially years off the start-up time, mostly by circumventing some of the issues with the sheer amount of travel necessary to start significant infrastructure across multiple planetary bodies. The details would be an optimization problem for the Cato in question, but more mass made things more efficient across a multitude of domains.

    For others, he had orbital forces ready, and there was a bit of worry that a few billion tons of material would be visible that close to the planet, but if Mii-Es was honest these types would have the most to lose. They were the ones most likely to suffer from any purge the Core Worlds decided to enact, and probably the most incentive to turn away from the System. Not that he planned to invade, not yet. He still had no idea how to deal with the Core, nor the worlds where features like floating mountains meant that there would be planetary-scale devastation no matter what.

    In fact, he didn’t yet know where the Core . He’d mapped out the bulk of the System, and determined that the central area was mostly within the Large Magellanic Cloud. The so-called Inner Worlds were mostly part of a dense cluster, something far more crowded than the stellar neighborhood around Sol. He’d gotten some telemetry from the Syden Lineage, but not enough to localize it, and his versions the Inner Worlds were still setting up, so he didn’t quite have the bandwidth to search millions of stars for a star system whose particulars he couldn’t even guess.

    “I’m ready for your Azoths, darling.” Mii-Es interrupted Cato’s somewhat scattered problem-solving. It went against the grain to actually rely on a System-god, but he could only do so much to shield the Sydean Lineage. Especially since, subjective decades later, effectively every version of Raine and Leese was disenchanted with the leveling grind. Reaching Azoth was the work of many long years, and clearly came with unacceptable risks. Even if the Sydean Lineage hadn’t been compromised by the gods, their minds had still been permanently altered by the Bismuth transition, which made it unpalatable to anyone else. The Sydean Lineage were the only ones who to be high rank.

    Cato broadcast to the trio still holed up in Yaniss’ Estate.

    Dyen asked, though clearly none of them were enthusiastic about the idea.

    Cato assured him.

    Dyen replied. Sёar?h the N??elFirё.net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

    Raine said, not privy to Dyen’s comments. Though it was hardly necessary to even say such a thing — at Azoth, their movement Skills allowed them to effectively teleport directly there, and do so without garnering much attention. It wasn’t clear to him how exactly essence senses worked, but he understood Azoths were fairly obvious.

    He didn’t have spy-eyes inside the Temple, but he did ask for access to Raine and Leese’s senses, just so he could be certain that nothing untoward happened. Normally he didn’t like to be so intrusive, and it was the sort of interface that required their direct permission. That kind of data feed was all too close to crossing certain lines that were either concerns of morality or intimacy, depending on relationship.

    Under the circumstances, though, it seemed warranted. There were still the lingering worries about how the System had compromised them, and he was a bit concerned by how entangled they’d become with each other. There was nothing he could do about that, though he did want to maybe tweak the combat brains to offset the personality changes to some extent. Not much, but at least reduce some of the artificial drive that pushed much of the divergent behavior with their pre-Bismuth templates.

    Despite his misgiving, the sisters had no problems giving him full access, which he felt was rather too trusting. But they still considered him their patron – which was a strange role he still hadn’t quite grasped – and had no issues letting him look through their eyes and parse the telemetry from their combat brains. Not that there was much for Cato to see; he couldn’t access the notifications except thirdhand, though the combat brains.

    Nevertheless, he picked up a faint golden glow when they reached the center of the Temple nave. It matched the color of divine-style Skills, a synthetic emission with a completely artificial spectral profile, much like the colors of every form of magic within the System. It lingered in the air around them like some kind of bizarre Cerenkov radiation, then faded.

    Raine reported, at the same time Mii-Es waved her hand at the comms pickup.

    “The blessing should obscure them and mark them as a god’s Chosen agents,” Mii-Es said, sounding a little bit wistful. “It might be possible for some Core Deity to revoke the blessing, but otherwise even the System will register them as god-blessed and nothing else.”

    “Fantastic,” Cato replied, to both Mii-Es via his puppeted frame and the Sydeans via radio.

    Leese noted, both on radio and aloud.

    “That’s easy enough,” Dyen said aloud, clearly less comfortable than the sisters in communicating strictly by radio-gland. “Disguise accessories are a common enough drop for Assassins.” He flipped his hand, probably delving into the spatial storage that System folks had, and tossed a pair of rings to Raine and Leese. Cato could tell by the telemetry that they took a moment to communicate, but it was a private conversation that he wasn’t privy to.

    The rings vanished, likely equipped through some arcane System process, and the pair changed drastically. Raine shifted to become larger, her tail altered to look like it was furred rather than scaled, and Leese became smaller, slighter of build, with a smaller and whippier tail. It certainly would fool any normal scrutiny, though Cato would bet that the sort of gait or body language analysis he had access to would be able to uncover them given time.

    Cato said, adding an extra tally to Dyen’s credit column. There was a limited amount he could do to repay the assassin, though certainly he imagined that being protected by a god’s blessing was worth something.

    Dyen shot back, and Cato sighed to himself.

    he said, underselling it a bit. He’d only made minor inroads on the Inner Worlds, simply because they required a higher rank to move through freely.

    Dyen replied, without any emotion. It worried Cato, but there was nothing he could do about it. Even if he in position to try an assault on a purely technical basis, he had no idea what kind of chaos that would set off given the oddities of the Inner Worlds. He wanted to have as many forces in position as possible before something pushed him to move again. As much as he hated seeing so many terrible things happening within the System, it just wasn’t worth getting worlds purged if he interfered. But there was always the risk of another annexation or something similar that would make him act before he wished.

    Cato told Dyen. He didn’t want to reveal too much about the scale of his coverage to Dyen, but it was probably impossible to hide.

    Dyen repeated, and then flickered as he vanished from the telemetry he was getting from the Sydean Lineage. It was only by the radio link that Cato knew where he was, and even that vanished a moment later.

    Leese sent.

    Cato agreed. He didn’t trust Dyen at all, but there was no real reason for the man to betray any of his limited knowledge about Cato and the sisters. While he was sure the System types would like to know, they weren’t likely to be willing to burn the Tornok Clan for the sake of that information. Since that would be Dyen’s price.

    Raine replied, clearly perking up at the mention of supplies. From what Cato understood, the sisters hadn’t had a decent meal in . Azoths didn’t strictly need it, but then, neither did he, but Cato still cooked himself meals for his station-bound frames.

    Cato didn’t push for them to get to work. He knew them well enough by now – he ought to, even if the versions he was most familiar with were not the Sydean Lineage – so he trusted them to handle their time and responsibilities without any prodding. Besides, a couple hours of debrief wasn’t nearly enough time to bring them up to speed on everything that had happened in the past ten years, plus he hadn’t had enough of a conversation to see if they’d truly changed. In fact, he hadn’t even brought up the fact that the lizard pets were still waiting for them, though they’d been sort of adopted by a different Lineage in the interim. There was no rush.

    Or so he thought.

    “Cato, I just received a notification,” Mii-Es said, only a day later. Cato-Uriv pinged a moment later with a similar mention from Initik. “The world of Gyvestral has been condemned, and will be purified soon. The Deity for that world has already reached an agreement with the Core Worlds, it seems — he’s one of their scions, so of course he did,” Mii-Es scoffed. “The Great Clans just don’t want to stir up resentment like last time.”

    He had to scramble for a second to figure out which world that was, but then it was obvious — the last place Raine and Leese had been spotted by Muar and the world that Yaniss had evacuated them from. The entire operation had been a bit slapdash and spur-of-the-moment, but that was the nature of reality. Nothing ever truly went to plan.

    Cato-Gyv received the urgent notifications from various other versions of himself, several dozen of them, as if repetition would somehow help. It sent him into high framejack, though after going through the messages he had more like thirty hours than the three the exterminatus had given people before. Enough time, he hoped, given that he’d had the better part of a decade to build up.

    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

    While each component of the billions of tons of materiel in orbit had been tested unto death, they’d never actually deployed it before. They never to deploy it, and Cato still would have preferred to perform a classic invasion to take the planet out of the System rather than risk dealing with exterminatus — but it was too late for that.

    Yesku Mille, née Leese Gyv, reported from the surface.

    Cato said. He genuinely didn’t know whether the exterminatus was simply meant to eliminate a compromised world, or whether it was meant as a weapon against his motivation and determination. Pragmatically, it was probably both, but Mii-Es had told him that the Core types at least had a guess that he was more widespread than was obvious. He doubted they knew the true extent of it, but if they were fully dedicated to stopping him then they would be willing to use it at any moment.

    No matter the reasons, everyone who was Copper or Silver on the planet below had just been condemned to death. That was over twelve million individuals, primarily a species the System called Gaekos, a long-limbed and blue-furred pseudo-primate species. They reminded him a bit of great apes from Earth, except their limbs were attached wrong and their necks were oddly elongated. So far as Cato could tell, this was their homeworld, so the exterminatus even threatened genocide.

    The first wave of his response was several one-ton cannisters of bugs. The Big Bad Bug Bomb wasn’t something he could use to remove dungeons under the circumstances, but he hadn’t simply stopped development with the dungeon-killers. The general idea of being able to coalesce real biotechnology without warning was too valuable to leave as a single-use deployment.

    Half of the cannisters were meant to become a vast System-jamming network. He had a faint hope that by blanketing the entire planet with the neural static it might disrupt whatever mechanism was being used to sterilize worlds. But it was only a faint hope, and that was why the other half of the cannisters existed.

    Copper and Silver ranks didn’t quite have the defenses to fend off targeted biological agents. He had the genetics, the biochemistry, and the anatomy of every species on the planet below, which had led to custom-designed plagues and mindrippers. Calling them plagues was probably overwrought, but the Chill Out bioweapons were micro-organisms that pumped out neurochemicals to calm people, and the mindrippers were designed to instantly render people unconscious and digitize them , with a minimum of trauma.

    I hate deploying this stuff Cato said to Raine and Leese. They were all in the same virtual space for the moment, as there was nothing any of them could actually do on the surface. There was no fight to be had. This was a battle of preparations, of solutions, of scale, not of force or forces.

    Gold and Platinum ranks required more individual attention, but there were few enough of them that was not a problem — assuming they stayed. Most would probably evacuate through the portals rather stand fast in the face of certain death. He would absolutely do his best to save those, even if convincing them would be difficult. Anyone who cared enough to stay despite it all deserved nothing less than his best.

    As the timer ticked downward, fusion engines flared to bring massive swarms of factories and machines into a lower orbit. Half of his reserves stayed up high, just in case someone on the System side got the bright idea of pulsing the System outward before everything closed in order to slag all his hardware, but that was why he had made far, more than he would need, even when it came to worldwide coverage. Ten years of uninterrupted exponential growth resulted in a of product.

    “Evacuation warning,” Leese relayed, monitoring the remote frame they’d left down on the surface. Cato accessed the network of particle beams — not that he was intending to fire on an Azoth, should one show up in the middle of a populated city, but if he had a chance, he’d take it. Or if the Azoth tried to interfere with Cato’s efforts to digitize the populace. He already knew that Azoths could level continents, and if one city was the price to prevent that, he would have to steel himself and push the button.

    One thing he wished he knew was whether it was worth ripping the Interfaces. He was almost certain that there was a mind in there, , but he didn’t know for sure and there hadn’t been time before the portals closed in other worlds. That might change with Gyvestral, or perhaps Initik or Mii-Es would let him test it out — something that wouldn’t benefit Cato-Gyv, who just had to go at it blindly.

    “Hear this!” An Azoth appeared from a portal that ripped itself open above the capital city, as predicted, and started into an almost word-for-word duplication of the original speech. “This world has been condemned by Cato! No place that he has defiled can be tolerated by the divines, so let it be known that this is on his head!”

    “Off we go,” Cato muttered, and activated the Bug Bombs. The insects stirred into action, swarms lifting off from the countryside and flooding the now-pacified towns, linking up together and triggering certain processes to convert themselves to System-jamming smart biomatter. It was an absolute horror show from the outside, small black creatures – given their color by the prevalence of graphene filaments – wrapping themselves around people’s heads, while on rooftops or in clearings temporary antennae lifted themselves into the air. FungusNet was not nearly enough bandwidth to deal with the gestalts – not to mention all the genetic and biometric information, and relative relational analysis to ensure people were properly preserved and grouped – that were all being transmitted upward to the dense satellite network in orbit.

    Much further out, far beyond the moon, floated a swarm of armored computronium that all together made up an enormous aestivation, built to Summer Civilization specifications. Enough power to run millions of people, along with the environments and virtual intelligences necessary for onboarding and upkeep, framejacked or underclocked as required. Of all his infrastructure, that was the only thing that was vulnerable, and so it was well screened from the planet in addition to simply being so far away most System types couldn’t imagine it.

    The assembly of the Bug Bombs into System jammers prompted the System Defense quest over literally the entire globe, and Cato waited with backups holding just shy of a re-entry burn in case the local god decided to enact the sort of purge he’d seen in the past. Nothing happened, not immediately, so he hijacked some of the System-jamming biomatter that had infiltrated the capital. He hadn’t fully deployed there yet simply because that might prompt the Azoth to excessive action, and words were a better way to get what he wanted than action.

    “I am here,” Cato said, voice echoing from hundreds of sources around the city. “And you should leave.”

    “Heretic!” The Azoth sneered, though Cato’s surveillance caught some micro-reactions that showed the dispersed announcement was unexpected. “Blasphemer! We faithful will never obey you or bend to your will! I will stay here until all those who may still be useful have left.” There were actually surprisingly little traffic through the portal; a number of Golds had succumbed to Chill Out, and the Platinum in the World Administrator office had not stirred.

    “That’s all well and good,” Cato told him, not impressed. “But if you’re purging this planet your presence isn’t required here anyway. And if all these people will die, there’s no reason I shouldn’t kill you myself.” He wasn’t entirely bluffing. If the Azoth was going to stop him from digitizing the thousands of people in the capital, better to act than to just watch as everyone died — at least, that was the theory. In practice, he was hoping against hope that he could bluff the Azoth into leaving and he wouldn’t have to face that particular choice.

    “I am not afraid of your meaningless posturing,” the Azoth said, and Cato winced as the diatribe continued. Up in his virtualized office, he sighed and modified the instructions on the particle beam, setting it up to give a tenth-of-a-second burst. Less than it had taken to kill the Azoth back on Haekos, and in a way relying on the System’s own mechanics. If it wasn’t enough to kill the Azoth, then the defensive skills would absorb the bulk of the energy, so he wouldn’t level the entire city.

    A brief blip of massively accelerated particles slammed through the atmosphere, spearing the Azoth as impossibly loud thunder rolled, shredding foliage and killing Copper-rank creatures in the surrounding zones. Most of the populace was shielded by buildings and bioweapon material, but much more than that brief burst would certainly create casualties. Cato didn’t know exactly how much damage the momentary inundation of relativistic particles had done but the Azoth screamed, even if he didn’t — and as he had hoped, Skills and basic System toughness had prevented a point-blank nuclear-level detonation.

    “That was a warning. Stay and die, or leave.” Even as he transmitted the ultimatum, he sent the instructions for the surviving Bug Bomb matter to start digitizing the city populace. Now that Cato’s presence was known, hopefully the Azoth wouldn’t recognize what was going on. “Or is annoying me worth your life — or one of your lives?” He had to assume that every Azoth he encountered had a resurrection available, and so they were to some extent expendable, in the same way his remote frames were. Which didn’t mean the threat was toothless. Dying still wasn’t fun, and unlike his frames, Azoths had limited lives.

    “This world is doomed regardless,” the Azoth said, and vanished. Though the portal, most likely, but there was no telling what the System allowed at that rank. Now that he didn’t have to worry about his efforts being stymied, he wasted no time in assimilating the capital city, with the exception of the Platinum. For that, he sent down a diplomatically-sized warframe, hoping he could convince the Platinum to join everyone else in digitization — and not interfere when he mindripped the Interface.

    Cato wanted to save .

    ***

    Meishile worried.

    She worried as she taught the Coppers in the courtyard of her husband’s Estate, instructing the children on the most basic functions of combat. She worried as she took messages by way of farcaster from the various groups of Golds that safeguarded towns all over the world. She even worried after she dismissed her students for the day, laying aside her farcaster and letting a sudden odd lethargy pull her down into one of the Platinum-rank seats at the window of the Estate. As much as the tired detachment kept her from summoning the will to do much, it didn’t stop the worries.

    It wasn’t a new thing, for she had been concerned ever since her husband had passed her in rank and continued onward to places she couldn’t go. For Meishile, Silver was the limit. Even Peak Silver enemies were too much; too fast, too powerful, requiring her to track too many things. Emkhil assured her that she could handle it, but she knew better. And so she had stayed Silver while he had moved onto Gold, and then Platinum.

    Then the Crusade had come. Even before the Crusade she was deeply, painfully aware of how much more quickly she was aging and she wondered, even if she feared to mention it, how long Emkhil would stay with her. So few Platinums stayed, after all, going on to the Inner and Core worlds, becoming strange and distant, breaking through to Bismuth and becoming something else entirely. the Crusade, there was even more pressure for Platinums to leave and reach the Inner Worlds to become more powerful, more capable.

    So far Emkhil hadn’t succumbed to it, but Meishile knew it was only a matter of time. His rank was still creeping up, despite being restricted to Gyvestral. Her Emkhil was driven, focused, and needed more than what their small world could offer. But that didn’t mean she to lose him.

    [Evacuation order! All people are ordered to leave Gyvestral]

    The prompt pulled Meishile out her strange lassitude, and even though she stood, she couldn’t bring herself to do anything. Not that there was anything to do — at Mid Silver, she leave. Not since the portals had changed to prevent anyone below Peak Silver from using them. Nevertheless, she opened the door to the Estate courtyard, looking out at the spire of the Nexus in the distance. She couldn’t possibly reach him, and couldn’t bring herself out of her odd, floating mood to even speak, but she still willed for Emkhil to take the opportunity.

    For some reason fear didn’t come, though she knew that she was doomed. Her children, out with the other Silvers by the Conflict Zones were doomed. Whatever spell had befallen her prevented the panic that should be twisting her guts and overtaking her thoughts. But she wanted Emkhil to live, somewhere out in the System. Somewhere that he wasn’t chained to a world too small for him, with a wife and children who could never keep up.

    In her vision a quest rolled out an endless series of locations. Calamity had covered the world; everything was ending. Then there was a flash of impossible lightning and deafening thunder, out of the clear sky, and the light dimmed. There seemed to be a darkness in the sky that was not of night, like some great force had stolen half the sunlight.

    And yet, she heard the familiar crackle of her husband’s movement Skill, and he appeared, bringing with him their two children. A son, a daughter — and something unfamiliar as well, a small black creature standing on his shoulder. For a moment, the day was less bleak, but at the same time, she despaired because she knew that he would not save himself.

    “Emkhil,” she said, finding her voice floaty and strange. “You cannot stay.”

    “I could never leave,” he replied, putting his arms around her.

    “We will all die,” she said, clutching his hands.

    “Perhaps not,” Emkhil said to her, and freed one hand to reach up and lift the black creature off his shoulder. “Cato is offering us a chance to live.” Meishile looked upon the black creature, and hated it, for it was what brought ruin to them, but could not summon the energy to strike it.

    “How can we trust him?” She asked instead.

    “What have we to lose?” He asked in return.

    “It will be a strange experience,” Cato said, speaking in a voice that did not fit such a tiny creature. “But I intend to preserve this entire planet. There isn’t much time, however. Best to get started now.”

    “Are you certain?” She looked in to Emkhil’s eyes, and he returned her pained look.

    “It’s lose you for certain, or only maybe,” Emkhil said. “I’ll take the risk.”

    “Then — I suppose we will,” Meishile said, reaching out to gather up her children as well.

    “Thank you,” Cato said.

    Darkness.

    Light.

    Meishile found herself standing just as before, but in the Estate. Instead it seemed like they were on some other world, with a different sky and a different style of dwelling behind them. All the dreadful ennui that had afflicted her on the surface fell away, and she drew long, shuddering breaths as she suddenly realized that .

    “Mom? Dad?” Keshel said, somewhat confused as she glanced around, taking in familiar-yet-not surroundings. “What exactly is going on?”

    “The System decided to destroy your world.” The answer came from an unfamiliar being, a strange form with strange dress, but who could only be Cato. Meishile couldn’t even sense him — then with a start, she realized that none of her essence senses worked at all. Alarmed, she tried to pull up her Status, but that didn’t work either.

    “My rank—” she said, glancing from her husband to her children, who all seemed to realize the problem at the same time.

    “There are no ranks here,” Cato said, and waved his hand toward the dwelling, where several chairs and tables were set out on the porch. “This is something we should sit and discuss, for now you are outside the System, and everything is different. There is nothing to fight, and all the paths that used to be closed are open again.”

    “No fighting?” Emkhil said, leading the way to the porch. Meishile found herself nodding along with her husband’s incredulity. Fighting life. Without it, nothing could happen. It made no sense to simply declare that the whole basis of existence no longer applied.

    “But if we don’t fight for it,” Meishile said slowly, stepping up onto the porch and looking at the chairs without really seeing them, before turning to Cato. “If we don’t fight for it, how can we have a…” Meishile trailed off and fluttered her hand. “Anything?”

    “You do have to fight for it,” Cato said, lifting a finger to show he wasn’t quite done with his nonsensical reply. “The future is something that always requires hard work. I’m just broadening the you can approach that fight. Monster combat is only one tiny piece of reality, and what I want to give you is the rest of it.”

    “That’s ridiculous,” her son said, face drawn into a scowl. “How can anything that way?”

    “I’m sure there are some sixteen million people who would agree,” Cato said, not at all bothered by the challenge. “That’s why I need your help. No ranks, no Skills, no mandated combat — I’m sure it seems like I’ve taken away everything that made sense and given you nothing in return. But here we have all the time in the world, and perhaps together we can figure out new ways of fighting that will not leave all those people out in the cold.”